Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
I was apprenticed at the plant of Remington Rand UNIVAC in Frankfurt-Rödelheim during the sixties to become a mechanic. That time most of the data processing still was mechanical. The finish of all the equipment was dominated of a dark grey curling varnish.
After finishing my apprenticeship period I made a training course about the 1004 logic (3-xcess code) to further work in the final test: Several test programs - each on a plugboard - had to be run until the procedure finished with no errors (of course).
During the production process the units were standing on rollable platforms which were lifted about 30cm and all the doors still were not yet installed. With two huge fans placed on the back and on the right the electronic was kept cool. Each colleague had his small rolling stool and a huge tektronix osci to fetch the existing errors. Faulty electronic cards could be replaced from a stock of spare cards.
For the card reader I remember an interesting feature: it was capable of reading 90 column and 80 column cards. The division was made by a magnetic wheel coupled to the transport wheel and several adjustable reading/writing heads.
The printer unit which came preassembled from US existed in 2 speed variants, the printing process was divided in odd and even columns because of the current consumption.
Mar 30, 2025, 10:28:10 AM
Posted to Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board